The present disclosure relates to information retrieval.
Information retrieval systems, especially Internet search engines, help users by retrieving information, such as web pages, images, text documents and multimedia content, in response to queries. A search engine locates and stores the location of resources and various descriptions of the information in a searchable index. The search engine may then use a variety of signals to determine the relevance of the resources in the index to the user's query.
Formulating a query that accurately represents the user's informational need can be challenging. For example, users may use query terms which are too general or ambiguous to yield high quality search results. That is, the search engine may return a number of resources which match the user's query, but which are unrelated to the informational need of the user. In such a case, the user may have to enter a number of different queries about the same topic before reaching resources that are of interest to the user. Refining the search can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience for the user.
It is desirable to provide improved techniques for providing meaningful search results to the user conducting the search.